Jot Thought

We’ve been dabbling with Twitter lately and the verdict is still out in terms of it’s overall value.  There are definitely times when it seems like more of a distraction than a valuable tool.  There are also times when it’s just unavailable for long stretched.

But the other day, I came across a curiously powerful use for Twitter - better understanding customer needs, and especially, the language they use when expressing those needs.  I posted on our Paybackable blog about the specific example of where we foudn this useful, but the crux of it is that you can use a great little tool called Tweetscan to search the public timeline.  On a lark, I typed in “expense reports” and got a ton of posts (aka tweets) from everyday people complaining about doing expense reports.  I did it again this morning and the consistency in language is impressive.  You can check out my blog post about the insights this generated for us.  If you want to quickly see the results of the search, try it yourself.

No, this isn’t the most groundbreaking breakthrough in customer insight gathering, but still a nice little addition to the arsenal.

Well, it took us about a week longer than we thought, but we just released a major upgrade to Paybackable. There are 2 key elements to the release:

1. The ability to create company accounts and add employees
2. We added paid account plans

We also rolled out a new look and feel that was created by real designers, as opposed to Kevin hacking around.

So we’ll be giving DHH’s “advice” a whirl and trying to actually charge money for a useful web service.

If you know any small companies who want to simplify their online expense reporting, please send them our way

In case you haven’t seen these yet, compare the following two videos from StartupSchool ‘08: the first by Greg McAdoo at Sequoia and another by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals and Rails fame.

We found them both particularly interesting because we are currently wrestling with the decision of whether to try to go raise money for our company or continue bootstrapping it. We have two products in the market: Paybackable, which provides very simple online expense reporting and has a bunch of users and Bootstrap, which is in private alpha. We are close to releasing a major upgrade to Paybackable that will add support for company accounts and employees. The release will also introduce paid plans, much like 37Signals’ products. So we’re about to learn first-hand how difficult it will be to try the approach in David’s video.

For Bootstrap, it’s a much grander vision and frankly, we don’t know if we can afford to do it justice in a reasonable amount of time by funding it ourselves. Hence the interest in raising money. We’re gathering as much advice as possible and will begin getting feedback on our pitch very shortly. But it seems clear that once we head down this path, it’s go big and exit or bust.

So we’re at an interesting crossroad. Do we shoot for the stars? Or do we try to become a “lifestyle” company - to use a popular term in the private investing space. Right now, all we know is that there are some pretty important problems that we can solve for small business owners like ourselves. We’ll see what the future holds.

If you look up the IRS instructions for tracking business miles, you won’t find the word odometer. And yet most solutions in the market ask for starting and ending odometer readings to calculate mileage.

We wrote a post about a better way to calculate mileage over on our Paybackable blog, including how we’ve made it easier to do so from Paybackable itself.

Self employment is about to get easier…

We have officially moved into private alpha on Bootstrap, our first major homegrown application. We aren’t saying much about it at this point while select users are banging away on it. But we can say this - it will definitely increase the time an entrepreneur can spend growing a business, rather than dealing with the hassles of running it. It’s entirely web-based and will work on all the major browsers…:-)

If you would like to learn more about Bootstrap, go to our home page at www.gobootstrap.com and submit your email. We’ll keep you posted as we open access to more folks and unveil specific features.

Another interesting post, this time in the Wall Street Journal’s Independent Street blog, about using social networks to promote your business.

Several interesting comments from some business owners. While clearly in the early stages, I think this is going to be an interest way to how businesses will market their products going forward.

We just created a branded product page on Facebook, using their Page Manager application.‚ Check us out at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Esomnie-Software/9913611301.

One thing that struck me as being partifularly interesting is the potential use of Pages as a CRM (customer relationship management) tool. By inviting one’s customers to become “fans”, Facebook makes it drop dead simple to communicate with them, including opt-in inbox delivery of updates. Whether you’re a small business, an aspiring musician, or a large enterprise, it’s an interesting solution to‚ a traditionally thorny problem.

Kudos to whoever came up with this at Facebook - very clever.

QuickenMobile , a cool little app we built for Intuit, was launched at MacWorld this week. It sends you text messages with balances and recent transactions for your bank and credit card accounts. We built it in JRuby on Rails to interface with Intuit’s java-based aggregation web service and deploy within their java stack. Here’s the beta sign up screen.

In addition to the transaction aggregation and sms capabilities, one of Intuit’s own, Zach “Money” Moneypenny built an iPhone interface for the application. He was working the show when we stopped by - here he was bringing it up on his iPhone.

Have to say, it was cool seeing something we built being demoed at MacWorld. We even heard that a senior member of the Google mobile team found it to be pretty cool. It was also very nice to see the other apps the Quicken team were showing off. In addition to QuickenOnline, which also just launched, they were demonsrating the coming version of Quicken for the Mac. What I found particularly interesting is that the entire program is being re-written from the ground up using Cocoa. From what I saw, it looks great. They’re about to go into Beta and both Ben and I signed up. Here’s a pic of what I like to call Cocoa Quicken…

We didn’t spend a ton of time at the expo, but while we were there it was pretty crowded. The logistics of getting in were terrible - our passes didn’t have promo codes, which the registration software required, there were tons of different lines with the exact same signs above them, and the badging process was a hilarious cluster. I’d be curious to know the results of a process excellence evaluation of IDG’s logistical approach. But I shouldn’t complain - I wouldn’t want to solve that issue for a living.

We did stop by the MacBook Air, though it took some effort to actually get your hands on one. It was kind of funny that everyone one wanted to pick them up and play with them, but you had to keep them over the counter. Made for an interesting dynamic (see pic below:)

Our final stop before heading out was to chat with the folks at NeatReceipts, who were showing off their receipt scanning solution for the Mac. We’re talking to them about integration with Paybackable and our “kinda secret” forthcoming app. Stay tuned for more on that.

We released an update to Paybackable.com this morning that adds mileage expense tracking. It uses up-to-date IRS rates (now 50.5 cents per mile for 2008) to calculate how much you can get reimbursed for those business miles. Just enter the date of travel, a description (purpose of trip, destination, who you saw, etc.) and the miles driven and Paybackable will calculate the correct amount.

One other interesting note about this feature: it actually solves a gap in QuickBooks. Their vehicle mileage tracking feature doesn’t support reimbursing employees for their miles. To quote their support site: “You cannot use vehicle mileage tracking to reimburse your employees for mileage.” Their suggested solution is to create a bill payable to the employee (or vendor) with line items for the trips. This is precisely what Paybackable does, which is nice.

Check it out at www.paybackable.com

We found an interesting bug yesterday while working on one of our JRuby projects. In our application we are downloading transactions from various banks. I noticed an interesting bug while testing against my bank account where transactions with only cents and no whole amount were downloaded incorrectly. A transaction for $0.45 would, incorrectly be downloaded as $4.50. We determined that the issue stemmed from a JRuby bug in BigDecimal. The following test cases showcase the bug.

BigDecimal.new("0.10").to_s("F")
=> "1.0"
BigDecimal.new("0.01").to_s("F")
=> "1.0"

I have created a patch for JRuby 1.0.2 which fixes the issue. I have submitted to the JRuby project and Headius told me it should make it into JRuby 1.0.3 and also the trunk. If you can’t wait for 1.0.3, which is due in the next couple of weeks, you can download the patch I submitted. If you are too lazy to apply the patch your self, let me know and I’ll send you the JRuby jar file with the applied patch that I created for our project.